Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04.

Dock hiding

The Unity dock will automatically hide when there is a maximized window open on the desktop or when a floating window is positioned in a place that would partially obscure the dock. The user can reactivate the hidden dock and force it to temporarily show itself by moving the cursor to the left-hand edge of the screen.

When you use the left edge to recall the dock, you have to keep the cursor in position for just under a second. The time is just enough to prevent accidental invocation of the dock, so you don't have to worry about triggering it by accident when you are interacting with user interface elements along the left edge of the screen. The value of this feature isn't obvious at first, but it's extremely helpful in practice.

The hiding behavior is fairly unobtrusive and well-implemented. You get convenient dock visibility during regular use but it won't clutter the screen when you are focused on something else. I think it's a better compromise than the approach taken by GNOME 3, which will only show its task dock when you open its application dashboard.

As we will discuss later in the article, the dock hiding behavior in Unity is configurable—though not as much as we would have liked. You can disable hiding completely or make it more aggressive.

Keyboard accessibility

The Unity environment offers more than enough keyboard accessibility to satisfy those of us who disdain the productivity sacrifice of mousing. Canonical took some inspiration from Microsoft to keyboard-enable the Unity dock. The dock items—permanent and transient—are numbered and can be activated by pressing a combination of the Windows key and the associated number key.

If you simply press and hold the Windows key, the numbers will be displayed on the relevant dock items in an overlay. Pressing and holding the Windows key will also cause the dock to display itself if it is hidden—a feature that is tremendously useful for getting a quick look at your running tasks when you have a window maximized.

Several of the built-in dock features have letters associated with them instead of numbers. You can access these features from the keyboard by holding the Windows key and hitting the relevant letter. For example, the letter "s" is bound to the spaces view and the letter "f" is bound to the file lens. The use of letters instead of numbers for permanent dock items is advantageous because it ensures that the shortcut remains consistent regardless of how many other items are in the dock.

Default launcher icons

An assortment of application launchers are included in the dock by default in the standard Ubuntu installation. These include the file manager, the Firefox Web browser, several components of Libre Office, the Ubuntu Software Center, and the Ubuntu One configuration tool. At the bottom, you will also find icons to access the trash can, the workspace switcher, and several Unity lenses (we will discuss lenses in greater detail later in the article).

The default selection seems a bit odd on the surface. The Libre Office icons, for example, seem like a particularly odd choice. I can understand putting a word processor in there, but I can't imagine that enough people want to run Libre Office Impress (a Powerpoint-like presentation program) on a daily basis to make it worth putting in the dock by default.

Displaying the Software Center and Ubuntu One icons by default in the dock also seems misguided. It smells like a desperate attempt to make those things more easily discoverable by any means necessary. On a humorous side note, several of the regular computer users who participated in Canonical's Unity usability tests mistakenly thought that the Software Center's brown paper bag icon in the dock was a recycle bin.

Spaces and desktop

Unlike GNOME 3.0 and previous versions of Unity, Ubuntu's new Unity environment in 11.04 doesn't do away with desktop icons. The conventional support for desktop-based file management is left entirely intact, rendered by Nautilus. This is a useful feature, and I was relieved to see that it hasn't been needlessly cut in Ubuntu 11.04.

Workspaces and virtual desktops are a popular feature of the Linux desktop. Unity provides conventional workspace support and is configured by default with four separate workspaces. You can zoom out and see your workspaces by clicking the "Workspace Switcher" icon in the Unity dock. This will show you the grid of four desktops, allowing you to easily move windows between them. When you want to zoom back into a desktop, you just double-click the one you want.

This feature works relatively well, but its usefulness is diminished by the lack of a workspace preview mechanism in the Unity desktop. The workspace switcher button is adorned with what looks like a small workspace preview, but it's actually just a static icon. I'd be much happier if it could show an actual preview in the dock, like the classic workspace switcher panel applet in GNOME.

Without any visual cues to remind me of what I have on my desktops, I often forget entirely. Fortunately, the dock is global and will the display icons of applications from all workspaces, so it will help me remember when I have applications open that aren't on the current workspace.